If you spend the extra money to purchase premium seating in the cinema, I do not think it is unreasonable to expect some of the best seats in the house. Certainly I don’t expect premium seats to be some of the only seats in the house that have an interrogation lamp pointing at them from the ceiling for the entire duration of the movie.
Tonight’s showing of Taken 2 in screen 1 of the Beckenham branch of Odeon was ruined by this errant light. I understand that the aisles needs some low level lighting for those people who have a bladder too weak to last the 90 minutes of a movie – fine. But this light – this one was at least 5x as bright as all the others. It was so distracting that one of my group even went out of the movie to ask them to turn it off. Needless to say that they did not do so as they claim it is an “emergency light”. I call bullshit on that because there are no others like it in the entire screen.
So in this case, we’ve paid more than a lot of other people for the premium seats, but gotten a much lesser experience. Not good at all, but the person I feel most sorry for is whoever was one seat behind and to my right, as they must have got a full reflection from that light from my bald patch!
And while I’m here Odeon, your digital projector in there has a strange grey banding on the left hand side near the top, and there is a small patch of heat haze at the top about a quarter of the way across from the left. If you’re going to charge £11.50 for a 90 minute experience and get away with it, you’d better make that experience perfect.
- Movie: 7/10
- Cinema: 3/10
